Annual Pitchfork Music Festival diatribe: Am I getting too old for this?

During his band's headlining set Sunday night at the 2009 Pitchfork Music Festival, Flaming Lips frontman and chatterbox Wayne Coyne said repeatedly that this event was the coolest of its kind in the country.

In a lot of ways, he's right. Where else do you get dozens of slightly and very below-the-radar acts performing to an unusually music-conscious subculture in a setting where the food is decent and the tickets not overwhelmingly expensive?

Too full

Well, people have caught on. You might say it's gotten too cool for its own good. The Chicago event appears to have outgrown its venue, for one thing. As in previous years, it packed in a capacity crowd of 18,300 each day. Despite what organizers are saying, any person who attended -- and certainly anyone who waited in one of the interminable bathroom lines -- will tell you it felt a lot busier.

The follow-up question is whether the attendance was counted before or after festival organizers released hundreds of additional last-minute tickets to combat the scalpers.

Either way, it was packed. An event such as Rothbury -- with which Pitchfork has little in common aesthetically -- spreads 35,000 people across many acres of woods and grass. Pitchfork crams nearly 20,000 into an area roughly the size of Wilcox park. Certainly the city has bigger spaces that could accommodate Pitchfork before ticket prices go through the roof.

The morons have arrived

A friend of mine who went to both festivals remarked that the company of hippies was preferable to that of hipsters. While I couldn't care less about seven-eighths of the music offered at Rothbury (even though its hip-hop was much better than Pitchfork's this year), I begrudgingly agreed that, yes, there were more people at the Chicago event whose throats I wanted to punch.

The festival apparently has started to attract the sort of numskull whose natural habitat is Lollapalooza. Anecdote: During French trio M83's Sunday afternoon set of killer synth-pop, bandleader Anthony Gonzalez attracted snickers and sarcasm from the audience because of his thick accent.

Come on now, it's funny that a French guy sounds French? A person learns enough of your language to thank you for watching him play, and this is your idea of Midwest hospitality? The band sounded hot, though:

Fashion failure

It used to be I could go to Pitchfork and come home with a good idea what kids would be wearing to the Meanwhile within three months. But 2009 offered very little in terms of people-watching. I guess we can prepare for another year of neon sunglasses.

If the Pitchfork subculture has suddenly become more self-conscious, I think the amazing Look at this (Bleeping) Hipster blog -- which is a tumblr site for absurd so-called hipster fashion disasters -- can take credit. For every girl wearing half a marching band uniform or guy in tiny cutoffs and cowboy boots, there was somebody following them with a camera phone, I assume to submit their photos to the site. Public humiliation would do certain people a world of good.

Otherwise, not much to observe fashion-wise. Reports of a '90s grunge revival amounted to bogus trend-mongering, although I did notice a lot of people wearing t-shirts for albums like Nirvana's "In Utero" and Alice In Chains' "Dirt," which are shirts I had when the actual records came out. I had a point to make about the nostalgia and the passage of time, but I'm too crippled by feelings of mortality at the moment. I'll move on.

At least the music was good

Complain as I might, the music was mostly excellent. The Flaming Lips did the usual LSD freakout shtick, which would have been a lot cooler if it was 2005 and every festival audience in the world hadn't already seen Coyne in the giant hamster ball.

The band was supposedly performing a fans-pick-the-setlist show, but the Lips basically disregarded the format and did its hits and some obscurities. Also in the set were two new songs -- whose titles I'm thinking were "When She's High" and "The Differences Between Us" -- that were good enough to suggest the "At War With the Mystics" record was just a misstep.

Likewise excellent was the National, which closed out Friday night with a set heavy on material from the "Alligator" and "Boxer" albums. Due for a record any minute now, the group took the opportunity to unveil a few new tracks, which sounded good and in keeping with their recent creative strides. Here's "Mistaken for Strangers":

Not all of it, though

Pitchfork, the publication and the festival, has a long history of throwing acts into the spotlight that aren't ready for it. Into this category I'd place the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, whose record -- which is self-titled and sounds like a twee My Bloody Valentine -- is excellent, but whose Saturday afternoon set just didn't click.

Lose that keyboard. Teach the girl to sing. And, mother of God, if you're going to play a Fender Jaguar, you'd better be tremolo-picking. That's a major shoegaze fail.

One band whose intricate music didn't quite translate to its primetime night slot was Grizzly Bear, who otherwise are great on record and in small rooms. I left a few songs in to catch Danish dream-prog band Mew and don't regret the decision.

No act the entire weekend was done any favors by the sound.

There are a couple of token hip-hop offerings every year, and they were half good this time. Masked rapper DOOM, who is alleged to have lip-synched his set, ranked as a major disappointment, though Pharoahe Monch was inarguably solid. When, oh when, will Pitchfork finally book Kool Keith?

So now then...

I agree with Chicago Sun-Times critic Jim DeRogatis that live music should happen at night, indoors, with plentiful cheap beer. The trade-off for the physical rigors of a festival, obviously, is volume. But seeing a band play a 45-minute set outdoors during the afternoon isn't really seeing them, sorry.

But by the time it gets to be night, and the bands get longer sets, and it's cool outside, your back is too sore from standing all day to really have any fun. Or maybe that's age talking. See you next year? We'll see.